Chalk It Up, Part Two: Hoarders

It’s a special, lovely, rare day when what you think to yourself, “Wow, I’m really glad I obsessively saved this certain type of garbage.” It hasn’t happened with the plastic yogurt cups yet (shout out to my late Grandma Lois), but much to Jeff’s surprise and relief, we have found a purpose for my growing pile of clean, de-labeled glass jars.

When I ordered the tins for the spice rack, I couldn’t help pick up a few glass swing-top jars for our most commonly-used grains. Ideally, I’d love to re-do the entire pantry in glass jars, but the shopping cart got expensive quickly. So I started to re-purpose.

Spaghetti jars now hold arrborio rice and quinoa. Farro and pearl barley went into peanut butter jars, and the Israeli cous-cous is in a large salsa jar. They are so gorgeous I can’t bear to put them back in the pantry.

While I was on my Chalkboard Paint (CBP) Frenzy, I also decided to re-label all of our oils and vinegars. For these, I just washed and removed the labels and painted with CBP. Some of the bottles are prettier than others; I love the ACV and pomegranate molasses bottles especially. The others, I admit to not loving, but they look SO much better stripped and re-labeled than with their original labels.

Some of them either had super-stubborn glue, or I didn’t want to soak in hot water for too long, so I ended up making a really big CBP label to cover the stickiness. The bottles and jars took 6-7 coats of CBP, and there are more notes about the chalk pen and writing process on the spice rack post.

We have noticed that the bottles, much more so than the jars and spices, have suffered a lot of smearing of the chalk paint. We are considering doing another layer of CBP and just writing in metallic silver Sharpie, since we don’t foresee needing to change out the contents of each bottle.

Total cost of this particular project was minimal. The swing-top rice and cous-cous jars were about $4 each, but every other jar was saved from the recycle bin.

3 responses to “Chalk It Up, Part Two: Hoarders”

YES to this! I was just writing a post (in my head) about my love for pantries full of glass jars of things. And extra props for not going out and buying new matchy matchy mason jars. This is a far superior technique.

I am with you on reusing containers of glass for such beautiful food items. I think using your own handwriting is such a graceful and personal touch that no one can copy, really. Why, because each of us have our own handwriting style. Thank you for publishing this.